The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Although the narrative does not describe this "youth" in any detail, it does specify the "practical joke" for which he was expelled "from the state university": "he had removed the red lantern from the barrier about a street excavation and hung it above the door of the girls' dormitory" (186).

One of the two young men who play tennis with Horace and Frankie at Belle Mitchell's.

The youngest guest at Belle Mitchell's tennis party, Frankie is identified as the first woman in Jefferson to bob her hair.

A gossipy friend of Belle Mitchell's, it is she who tells Narcissa that her brother and Belle are having an affair. The narrator tells us that "her eyes were like the eyes of an old turkey, predatory and unwinking; a little obscene" (184).

First described by the narrator as a "young light negress" (27), Meloney is later referred to by Jenny Du Pre as a "mulatto girl" (394). She is Belle Mitchell's servant when Flags in the Dust begins, but soon goes into business for herself as a beautician with the money that Simon embezzles from the Second Baptist Church. At the end of the novel Simon is found murdered in her cabin.

Described as "a thin woman in a funereal purple turban" who eats with gestures of "elegant gentility" while visiting with Sis' Rachel in the kitchen, she is presumably the maid of one of the white ladies attending Belle Mitchell's afternoon social (26).

Physically described as "mountainous" (26) and identified as one of Jefferson's best cooks, Rachel works for Belle and Harry Mitchell, and makes no effort to disguise her preference for Harry over his wife.

Referred to only as "a sort of patriarch" among the Negro tenants on the Sartoris estate, and described as old enough to be "stooped with time," he owns the facilities - the mill and mule that grind the sugar cane and the kettle in which the juice is boiled - for making molasses (288).

One of the six members of the Second Baptist Church who call at the Sartoris plantation seeking restitution of the $67.40 that Simon has embezzled from the building fund.

One of the six members of the Second Baptist Church who call at the Sartoris plantation seeking restitution of the $67.40 that Simon has embezzled from the building fund.